Two Important Documentaries from Sundance

Robert Greene’s documentary “Kate Plays Christine,” which premièred at Sundance and stars the actress Kate Lyn Sheil, pierces the artificial boundary of drama and documentary.

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE SUNDANCE INSTITUTE

I’m in New York, not at Sundance, but I’ve had the pleasure of seeing two films that, by odd coincidence, premièred there simultaneously Sunday night and share some notable thematic and stylistic elements. Though there’s no need to pair them—both are major films that will stand enduringly on their own—the ideas they unite suggest why independent filmmaking, at a very low-budget range, remains a crucial source of artistic innovation. The films in question are “Kate Plays Christine,” directed by Robert Greene, and “Dark Night,” directed by Tim Sutton, and they have four major points of connection: Florida, guns, the overlap of fact and fiction, and the effort to create images of historic horrors for which no images exist.

Greene is a documentary filmmaker whose work on the subject of performance, in “Fake It So Real” and “Actress,” pierces the artificial boundary of drama and documentary. Kate is the actress Kate Lyn Sheil, one of the best and most original young American actresses, who has appeared in such films as “Silver Bullets,” “Sun Don’t Shine,” and “Men Go to Battle” (which she co-wrote). Christine is Christine Chubbuck, the television journalist who committed suicide by shooting herself in the head during her live broadcast of July 15, 1974, at a television station in Sarasota, Florida.

“Kate Plays Christine” is, in effect, the story of how an actor prepares—and how that preparation becomes a performance in itself. Greene asks Sheil to portray Chubbuck in a dramatization of her last days. Sheil and the filmmaker travel from New York to Sarasota, where she engages in research to learn about Chubbuck’s life and work, and Greene, with the cinematographer Sean Price Williams, films Sheil pursuing those investigations, which include interviews with as many of Chubbuck’s former colleagues as she can track down.

Meanwhile, Sheil also undertakes the material labors integral to the role. The blue-eyed actress gets fitted for brown contact lenses to match Chubbuck’s eye color; she gets fitted for a resplendent dark wig to match Chubbuck’s hair style; she subjects herself to a spray tan; she visits area stores in search of accessories to decorate a bedroom like Chubbuck’s own (one that was filled with stuffed animals and resembled a child’s); and—in a crucial sidebar that nearly takes over the film—she visits a gun shop to acquire the appropriate weapon for the role. In the process, Sheil and the shop owner (whose store is the very one where Chubbuck purchased her own pistol) walk through the procedure, on camera, of determining a buyer’s eligibility. (Of course, it’s a comically simple process, with no background check involved.) Soon thereafter, Sheil takes her newly acquired handgun to a gun range and does some target practice.

One amazing detail that emerges from Sheil’s discussions with former colleagues of Chubbuck’s is that Chubbuck had, unusually, asked her technical staff to videotape her show that day. Sheil inquired about the existence of the tape, which has never been shown. The closest she gets to the tape is the assertion by a former colleague that it’s locked away somewhere, in the possession of a woman whose father owned the Sarasota station at the time of the incident. Through this process, Sheil doesn’t so much incarnate Chubbuck as take upon herself fragments of Chubbuck’s existence. She becomes a sort of living mosaic, projecting onto herself the shards of Chubbuck’s material and emotional life, attempting to reflect her states of mind as well as her physical appearance and behavior. Greene and Sheil seem to conjure, in the present day, not only Chubbuck’s phantom presence but that of the missing link in the story: the videotape of Chubbuck’s final broadcast.

Chubbuck’s suicide followed her planned report on a local violent incident, the sort of “if it bleeds, it leads” story that had recently sparked her professional ire and frustration. An ambitious reporter, Chubbuck believed that the station’s emphasis on sensationalistic reporting of violent incidents was crowding out more substantial political news of the sort that she was pursuing. As her broadcast reached that episode, the film of the crime incident jammed in the gate. Informed on the air that the clip wouldn’t run, Chubbuck spoke her fateful lines: “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see another first: attempted suicide.”

Sheil and Greene, evoking a virtual Chubbuck by way of the places, people, artifacts, and, above all, ideas of Chubbuck’s life, also evoke her place and time—notably, the implicit politics that underlay her suicide. The popular, or pandering, reporting of what Chubbuck called “blood and guts” was a corollary of the politics of “law and order,” the widespread sloganeering response to the sharp increase in violent crime in the late nineteen-sixties. It’s the platform on which Richard Nixon was elected President, in 1968.

The fear of crime was matched by the appetite for stories about crime, and news broadcasts were only too ready to provide them. Though one short-term consequence of the new crime wave was gun-control legislation, the pattern soon turned. Trust in government to take the guns out of the hands of criminals dissipated, replaced by a paranoid distrust of government, leading to a virtual—and yet-unabated—nationwide passion for vigilante justice, in the form of rampant gun ownership in the ostensible interest of self-defense. Since then, even as crime has declined, our culture at large, fuelled by fantasies of first-person force, has become ever more violent.

Greene blends an investigative and a subjective approach to the story of Chubbuck’s life and death, refracting her experience through Sheil’s research and efforts at emotional as well as factual reconstruction. Ultimately, “Kate Plays Christine” subjects the very status of dramatic representation to a severe moral and aesthetic test, one far more stringent and comprehensive than a mere comparison of the factual record to the elements of fiction. Greene’s analytical critique of dramatization reflects the more commonplace reliance on a nonfiction record as a touchstone for drama—a reliance that risks tripping up true-story Hollywood films on the road to awards. The recent shift of drama in the direction of nonfiction is rooted in the shifting status of journalism, as well as in instantaneous access (thanks to the Internet) to firsthand accounts, documents, and analyses of contemporary and historical events.

Tim Sutton’s film “Dark Night” is a refracted dramatization of the shooting, in Aurora, Colorado, of random patrons at a screening of “The Dark Knight Rises.” *PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF SUNDANCE INSTITUTE *

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF SUNDANCE INSTITUTE

When, even as late as the nineteen-eighties, journalism was for the most part constrained by codes of propriety and tacit accords of silence—for instance, shielding politicians from reporting on their extramarital affairs—fiction remained the crucial forum for expressing the inexpressible. Now journalism is aptly unchained, and reported facts really are stranger than fiction. In a fight for its significance, fiction is likelier either to be tethered passively to true-ish details (note the correlation of true-story films to Oscar nominations) or to fly uninhibitedly into comic-book-style fantasy. Tim Sutton’s film “Dark Night” blends fiction and documentary on many levels, intermingling them with a shifting complexity. In the process, Sutton (the director of “Memphis”) conjures an imaginative portrait of lives that are fractured by painful burdens of reality and of fantasy.

“Dark Night” is a fragmented depiction of a town in Florida—as it happens, Bradenton, next door to Sarasota—that shifts from character to character and from micro-incident to micro-incident, in scenes that both seem like documentaries and appear to be staged. The movie’s title is an unsubtle allusion to “The Dark Knight Rises,” because Sutton’s film is a refracted dramatization of the shooting, in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theatre, of random patrons by James Holmes at a screening of the 2012 Batman movie. (There’s even a reference in the film to Holmes’s trial.)

Sutton’s view of the suburb where the action of “Dark Night” occurs is muted, introverted, as if he were probing not the sociably busy and engaged workaday lives of the movie’s patrons but the dream life, the stifled inner howl of teen-agers and young adults who are preparing to head to the shopping-mall multiplex, where an eagerly anticipated superhero film is about to open. The film offers a sort of impressionistic journalism, a self-conscious evocation of a place and time, a study in mentalities.

The characters are portrayed by performers who don’t seem to be professional actors, and whose names are the same as the actors who play them. Sutton includes journalistic interviews with several of the film’s participants, whose discussion of their lives seems to be derived from their actual lives and not from a script. Sutton isn’t on camera, and his voice is only rarely on the soundtrack, but the camera itself—in the exquisitely lyrical cinematography of Hélène Louvart—is an active mediator in the action, a virtual first-person narrator in musical images.

“Dark Night” offers no single participant as compelling as Willis Earl Beal, the musician protagonist of Sutton’s film “Memphis,” because it presents an entirely different spectrum of experience. The participants filmed in “Dark Night,” some of whom also struggle with thwarted cries of self-expression and efforts to create, come off mainly as masters of death, souls in the grip of a destructive drive that’s echoed in the destruction that many have witnessed, including in combat. The film’s suburban moods are haunted by violence. “Dark Night,” like “Kate Plays Christine,” features a scene at a gun range, and Sutton’s film also evokes an ambient sense of imminent violence brewing throughout the film—an air of doom, a pressure of static building up that seems ready to burst with a fierce discharge of energy long before the crime that the title evokes. The imaginary world of superheroes and commercial fantasies is as much a part of that fearsome tension as are the actual experiences that the participants discuss.

Both “Dark Night” and “Kate Plays Christine” have the virtue of recognizing images and fantasies as essential and inescapable elements of what might otherwise be narrowly defined as reality. In their blurring of familiar distinctions between documentary and imagination, between fiction and nonfiction, they become, in the highest sense, political films. They are movies about the very nature and inseparability of civic and intimate life, of the public and private realms, of fantasy and practicality. Their importance is paramount, especially at a time when the most urgent and crucial political film, “Chi-Raq,” is also a playfully imaginative work—and has been wrongly derided as such.